Jeffrey Knapp

Jeffrey Knapp is the Eggers Professor of English at Berkeley, and a Faculty Affiliate of Berkeley's Film and Media Department. After undergraduate and then graduate study at Berkeley, Knapp taught at Harvard for three years before returning to Berkeley in 1990. He received the campus’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2002; he is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEH Fellowship.

Knapp has written four books: An Empire Nowhere: England and America from Utopia to The Tempest (1992); Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (2002), which won the Best Book in Literature and Language award from the Association of American Publishers, the Book of the Year award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature, and the Roland H. Bainton Prize for the Best Book in Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference; Shakespeare Only (2009), which Choice named an Outstanding Academic Title of the year; and Pleasing Everyone: Mass Entertainment in Renaissance London and Golden-Age Hollywood (2017) -- Knapp's first book on film as well as literature and theater.

Knapp has chaired the Berkeley English department, the campus committees on Privilege and Tenure and on the Budget and Interdepartmental Relations, and the UC system-wide Committee on Academic Personnel.

Pleasing Everyone: Mass Entertainment in Renaissance London and Golden-Age Hollywood
Shakespeare's plays were immensely popular in their own day -- so why do we refuse to think of them as mass entertainment? In Pleasing Everyone, Jeffrey Knapp opens our eyes to the uncanny resemblance between Renaissance drama and the incontrovertibly mass medium of Golden-Age Hollywood cinema. Through fascinating explorations of such famous plays as Hamlet, The Roaring Girl, and The Alchemist, ....

Shakespeare Only
Three decades of controversy in Shakespeare studies can be summed up in a single question: Was Shakespeare one of a kind? On one side of the debate are the Shakespeare lovers, the bardolatrists, who insist on Shakespeare’s timeless preeminence as an author. On the other side are the theater historians who view modern claims of Shakespeare’s uniqueness as a distortion of his real professional life....

Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England
Most contemporary critics characterize Shakespeare and his tribe of fellow playwrights and players as resolutely secular, interested in religion only as a matter of politics or as a rival source of popular entertainment. Yet as Jeffrey Knapp demonstrates in this radical new reading, a surprising number of writers throughout the English Renaissance, including Shakespeare himself, represented plays....

An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest
What caused England's literary Renaissance? One answer has been that such unprecedented developments as the European discovery of America inspired English writers to "open up new worlds for the imagination." Yet England in the sixteenth century was far from an expanding nation. Not only did the Tudors lose England's sole remaining possessions on the Continent and, thanks to the Reformation, gr....

An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

ARTICLES

"Selma and the Place of Fiction in Historical Films." Representations 142 (2018): 91-123. Online version at http://www.representations.org/advance-publications/.

"Hamlet and the Sovereignty of Reasons." The Review of Politics 78 (2016): 645-62.

"Shakespeare's Pains to Please." In Forms of Association: Making Publics in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Paul Yachnin and Marlene Eberhart. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015. 256-71.

"'Throw That Junk!' The Art of the Movie in Citizen Kane." Representations 122 (2013): 110-42.